


Haunted by the World

by Measured_Words



Category: Ordinary World - Duran Duran (Song)
Genre: Angst, Coffee Helps, Loss, POV First Person, Parallel Universes, Resist the Void, Treat, Unknown Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 05:14:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11074788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured_Words/pseuds/Measured_Words
Summary: It was the only way forward - now you are in a land of wonder, and I'm trapped here in the ordinary world.





	Haunted by the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



> Happy Jukebox!
> 
> I love this song so much, and I have some pretty strong mental story associations with it already, so it was fun to take some of those and recontextualize them a bit into a short little treat. I hope you enjoy it!

I have to remind myself that this is what I wanted. It’s what we both wanted. We chose this. I have to remind myself that the alternative was nothing. It was the void, consumed and consuming, destroying not only our worlds, but all possibilities. This is hard, but it is better.

I look out the window, and everything looks alien to me. You tried to explain what it would be like, but your notes to me seem so empty without you to give them life. My wonder is fading, and my fear, but I want to hold on as long as I can.

I try to think of you, what might be happening in my word - home. Will you take up my place in the war? I feel like I’m at a disadvantage because your world, in some ways, is more innocent. You have your wars, you have done terrible things to your home, but these conflicts are, in a sense, internal. This one universe seems like a smaller scale when you know what we know. No one here would understand, if I tried to explain. At the same time, I’m lucky because you were different - the isolation and reclusiveness you fell into, knowing that something was wrong but not what - will help me pick up the pieces of your life and move forward into something that might be my own. It will seem to the few who know you like you are coming out of a cocoon, or waking from a deep sleep: finally healed and whole. 

I miss you - I miss the clarity I felt when we came together, when we bridged the disruption, when we spoke and drank and sealed our pact to heal the growing tear. But I miss my life. I miss Elisse, desperately, right now. I hope you will take care of her. I hope that if she can’t love you in my place, that she will find someone to make her happy. I hope that we were right, that that the nature of my world means you can stay true to yourself more easily. That you won’t lose what you’ve found. If it came down to only us as every other reflection faded into shadow, I hope we were worth it. 

You looked at my world with such wonder and you made me see that again. Maybe I can reach it in my dreams. Maybe I can hold on there. I look out the window at the gathering clouds, and I know that here that means nothing more than rain, water falling from the sky. I feel an echo of a sigh, but it must be yours, this feeling of restlessness. Or it comes from you, my spirit settling in to your form, the shape of you that belongs here. Rain is an inconvenience, that’s all. I don’t think you felt wonder here - it makes me want to go and look for it. There must be marvels here that you never had a chance to show me. 

If I leave now, I can go to the bodega, the store on the corner. I don’t know the name of the man who runs it, or where he came from. You never asked. Maybe I will ask. Maybe I will buy a newspaper and a cup of coffee and not question. I remember how relieved you were to learn that there was coffee where you were going. I never told you that I felt the same. We are, in some ways, already the same. We always have been the same. There is some comfort at that.

I look around, and I recognize more and more - your memories fall into place. You wanted to study physics, and you still have the books, even though your classes couldn’t offer you the answers that you needed. Maybe I will turn back to that. Maybe that is where your marvels lie. I know that there are more binding rules here, enough to make the possibilities of home feel like magic. It is because you are closer to the void. 

I feel like I can hear you, standing before this shelf, can hear your disgust and your disappointment. Maybe all we went through was worth it, if only to save you from this. I hear your loneliness. I feel it, weighing me down. 

Maybe I was wrong, and I can’t make a new life from what you left me. Maybe that was my pride again, leading me to overreach. But I think about what you told me, as the first drops of rain start to fall, about how little it seemed to do - how it could never clear away all the grime and dust of the city, about the smell of dirty concrete steaming dry in the sun. Maybe I can’t be washed away, either, not completely. Maybe I will take your life and live with your ghost. Maybe this is still a journey we can take together, my incomplete self and the echo of your life. 

I think again of coffee, of the small and mundane things we already share. Maybe they will be enough to ground me, to keep my memories of home from seeming like madness. I hope so - I hope that I can learn to survive, to get by in this world.


End file.
